Future of cities

Xuemei Bai, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Japan

Urbanization: Is the Chinese Model Sustainable?

Good morning!

I am asked by the organizer of this session to talk about urbanization in China, asking the question of whether the Chinese model is sustainable. I was on my way out to a short family vacation and doing the last minute email checking, and simply replied yes in a hurry. Later on to my horror I realized that I have committed myself to an enormous question, perhaps too big for me to answer in ten minutes.

Let me start from what urbanization means in Chinese context. About 25 years ago, China had 220 cities. Now it has more than 660. China's urbanization ratio is about 40% now, with total urban population of 500 million. Some projection says the urbanization ratio will reach 60% in 20 years, and total urban population will be somewhere around 900 million.  Four hundred million population will become new urban dwellers! Assuming new cities will be built to accommodate these populations, it means 40 new Beijing, or 80 new Nanjing, or 400 new cities with one million population!

Urbanization in China has always been closely linked with industrialization and economic growth. Quoting a central governmental official's speech, "they are two inseparable wheels that carry the vehicle of economic growth." Nowadays China has become the world manufacturing center, and almost all of the factories are located in or near cities.

What does this mean in terms of environment and sustainability? Basic infrastructures such as wastewater treatment plants cannot catch up with the pace of urban population growth, leaving large portion of untreated wastewater discharged to rivers. Municipal solid waste is not properly treated. In some cases they are simply dumped to the outskirt of cities. Urban growth has converted surrounding agricultural land to paved urban land use. This is an important issue because very often the land surrounding cities are the most fertile land in China, and this land use change means a greater loss in agricultural productivity than the number of hectare show.

This close linkage between industries and cities means pollution from industrial production become an inevitable part of urban life in China. Chinese cities are often ranked as the world's most polluted cities. Taking TSP and sulfur dioxide as indicators, about 80% of urban pollution comes from industrial sources. While industrialization has provided the jobs for newly added urban dwellers, high degree of pollution are taking tolls. The incidence of respiratory diseases is high in cities, and in some cities lung cancer has become the top cause of death. Health experts blame air quality for this.

It is apparent that the transformation is at an unprecedented scale, speed and magnitude, and accompanies all sorts of environmental problems. I don't know of a way to measure whether an urbanization trend is sustainable or not. However, it seems to me it is less important a question to ask whether the current trend is sustainable or not, because the transformation is not something that can be stopped or reversed by a bad Sustainability score. It is therefore more important to ask how to move the process a little bit closer to a sustainable one, no matter where the current trajectory is located in the Sustainability spectrum.

As a researcher, I think there are many important questions begging for answer. For example, how the cities and their environment change over time? How decisions made by the cities influence the environmental trajectories of the cities and other regions? To what extent policy interventions to the process is possible and effective?

And these questions are not purely out of curiosity. The need for asking such questions comes from real world. I have a personal experience that I would like to share with you. As part of our urban environmental management project, we visited many cities, talking to environmental protection bureaus and mayors of cities. Once we were confronted by the practitioner in Beijing of air quality. They were shocked about this fact. Some of them told the TV reporter that they know the air is not that clean, but they didn't expect it to be the worst in China. Citizens started to demand the mayor to take action, which became a tremendous pressure to the mayor, who eventually made public pledge to make significant investment and drastic actions to reduce air pollution in the city.)

This year China has awarded ten individuals with the Earth Award. Among them, there is a Mr. Chen Fei, who is a farmer from Zhejiang Province. In China, plastic shopping bags are widely used, and casually discarded to become a public nuisance, which is sometimes called as the "white pollution". Fed up with the white pollution, Mr. Chen started his crusade against the use of plastic bags. He traveled 11 cities in his province, and went to larger cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou, Nanjing, presenting bamboo woven baskets to citizens and asking them to use these baskets for shopping and refuse plastic bags. In his own hometown he could succeed in completely eliminate plastic bags. He also visits schools, factories, and communities to deliver environment related seminars to enhance the awareness of the public. All of these activities he has done out of his own pocket. His initiative attracted wide media coverage, and had profound impacts.

What these stories indicate? They show the rising civil society in China, both to the right to a better environment, and to the responsibility of individual action. And I believe this will bring in a strong positive force into the dynamics of urban Sustainability.